I believe the only objective morality is that you must act without intent to harm others unless it is in self-defense.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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I'm not quite following. From my recollection meta ethics deal with the origins of morality, with absolutism being that morality is as inherent to nature as, say, gravity is, and relativism that morality is a social construct we have made up.
Is it hypocrisy to acknowledge something is a social construct while also strongly believing in it?
If I grew up in the 1400s I'd probably hold beliefs more aligned with the values of the time. I prefer modern values because I grew up in modern society. I find these values superior but also acknowledge my reason for finding them superior ultimately boils down to the sheer random chance of when and where I was born.
Subjective morality is self evidently true, but that gives us no information about how to live our lives, so we must live as if absolute morality is true.
We only have our own perspective. Someone else's subjective morality is meaningless to us, we aren't them.
Everything in moderating or something. I'm not an ear doctor
Absolute truth must exist, because if it doesn't, "there is no absolute truth" is absolutely true, which is a contradiction.
You arent the decider of what truth is though, especially for others.
Kind of, right? You're making strong assumptions about the meanings of words. A lot of continental philosophy has been written about this subject.
I mean, in the same vein, I can completely break reality if it can't stand a contradiction, watch:
This sentence is false.
Obviously truth is absolute. The question is whether morality is absolute or relative.
What’s even funnier- is the amount of people in the comments here that perfectly illustrate the humor in the post without even understanding why.
Could somebody explain it to me, please?
The humor is based on a seeming contradiction this guy's students exhibit.
They apparently simultaneously believe:
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in a relativistic moral framework - that morality is a social construct (that can mean other things, too, but morality as a social construct is a very common type of relativistic moral framework)
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that their morality is correct and get outraged at disagreements with their moral judgments.
This isn't logically inconsistent, but it is kind of funny.
It isn't logically inconsistent because, if you believe morality is relative and what is right/wrong for people in other societies is not necessarily right/wrong for people in your society, then assuming that the professor and his student are part of the same or similar societies, they should share the same or similar morality. People in the same society can disagree on who is a part of their society as well as what is moral. Ethics is messy. So, it is not necessarily logically inconsistent to try to hold others to your relativistic moral framework - assuming you believe that it applies to them too since "relative" doesn't mean "completely individualized". And, due to globalization, you might reasonably hold a pretty wide range of people to your moral views.
It is kind of funny because there is a little bit of tension between the rigidity of the ethical beliefs held and the acceptance that ethics are not universal and others may have different moral beliefs that are correct in their cultural context. Basically, to act like your morals are universally correct while believing that your morals are correct for you, but not for everyone, represents a possible contradiction and could be a bit ironic.
A good example of relativistic morality based on culture/society:
On the Mongolian steppe, it is seen as good and proper for the old, when they can no longer care for themselves, to walk out on the steppe to be killed by the elements and be scavenged - a "sky burial". Many in the West would find this unacceptable in their cultural context. In fact, they might say, it is wrong to expect or allow your mom to go sky bury herself in Ohio or say... Cambridge. Instead, they might think you should take her in or put her in a home.
Now, if your professor said to you "So you don't think Mongolians expecting their mothers to die in sky burials is wrong, but you believe me expecting my mother to die in a sky burial is wrong in Cambridge? Curious. I am very intelligent." You could probably assume they are either a Mongolian nomad or don't understand relatvistic morality.
Jokes on you, I don't believe in subjective morality.
Is he saying the first point is wrong or just that it conflicts with the second?
They conflict. The first one is a form of moral relativism (that how you should act morally depends on your culture/upbringing).
The second one is a form of moral absolutism (that there is a specific morality you should live by)
Basically someone saying there's no right answer while also saying they have the only right answer and everyone who disagrees with it is bad.
That it conflicts. He's saying that if you believe that morality is relative and every person/culture has the difficult task of defining their own, it's ironic to be so aghast when people have reached different conclusions than you.
This, we sadly have people who believe that open-mindness is a virtue, as long as you're open-minded in the exact same way as everypony else.
There are two opinions: mine and wrong.
It seems like that tension between those things (which I'd expect are natural intuitions that many people experience) would be a foundational principle in ethics. Is it? Is that the joke?
There are many people in the world who don't believe in moral relativism, and those people can somewhat easily argue that their view is the right one, and that people who disagree with them are wrong. You see this a lot in religious fanatics. They have a kind of internal consistency, and there are ways you could attack it, but there is a simple message.
But you also see people who think that moral relativism is a better worldview, but in the next sentence they will get upset that people disagree with them, which shows that actually they aren't accepting of moral relativism unless it's to their benefit. And they don't see this contradiction. It's this final point, this failure to realize their own words undercut their own professed views, that's entertaining.
as someone who never studied ethics academically, this was also my guess.
Setting aside the unshakeable part, morality should be somewhat rigid. While relative, that doesn't mean morality can or should change on a whim.
That it conflicts with the second viewpoint.
I don't see the problem. One can have unshakeable moral values they believe everyone should have while acknowledging those values may be a product of their upbringing and others' lack of them the same.
I think you're missing the significance of his phrase "entirely relative".
In moral philosophy, cultural relativity holds that morals are not good or bad in themselves but only within their particular context. Strong moral relativists would hold the belief that it's fine to murder children if that is a normal part of your culture.
I guess I'm parsing the statement as "understand it as a concept" when they mean "hold that position."
What about the last part: "viewing disagreement as moral monstrosity?"
I believe abortion is moral. I believe people who disagree are morally monstrous. I can also understand that their beliefs on whether abortion is moral or not can be a product of their culture and upbringing. What am I missing? Why is this odd?
Your approach is an absolute approach. You see another culture doing something that's monstrous and say hey that's monstrous but I guess that's how they were raised. In other words, your values are absolute.
When you say "abortion is moral," do you mean that it is never immoral? As in, you literally can't think of a situation where it would be wrong for a woman to get an abortion?
The only situations I can imagine where abortion would be immoral are extremely contrived scenarios that don't happen in reality.
Not the person you responded to, but yes, that describes me.
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I see no paradox here. Yes, the rubrics change over time, making morality relative, but the motivation (empathy) remains constant, meaning you can evaluate morality in absolute terms.
A simple analog can be found in chess, an old game that’s fairly well-defined and well-understood compared to ethics. Beginners in chess are sometimes confused when they hear masters evaluate moves using absolute terms — e.g. “this move is more accurate than that move.
Doesn’t that suggest a known optimum — i.e., the most accurate move? Of course it does, but we can’t actually know for sure what move is best until the game is near its end, because finding it is hard. Otherwise the “most accurate” move is never anything more than an educated guess made by the winningest minds/software of the day.
As a result, modern analysis is especially good at picking apart historic games, because it’s only after seeing the better move that we can understand the weaknesses of the one we once thought was best.
Ethical absolutism is similarly retrospective. Every paradigm ever proposed has flaws, but we absolutely can evaluate all of them comparatively by how well their outcomes express empathy. Let the kids cook.
In moral philosophy cultural relativism isn't merely an empirical observation about how morality develops, though. It's a value judgment about moral soundness that posits that all forms of morality are sound in context.
(When he says "entirely relative" that signals cultural relativism).
To use your chess example a cultural relativist would hold buckle and thong to the argument that if most people in your chess club habitually play scholars mate and bongcloud then those are the soundest openings, full stop, and that you are objectively right to think that.
Of course chess is a problematic analogy because there are proven known optimums, so tha analogy is biased on the side of objective morality.
To add to this, morality can be entirely subjective, but yeah, of course if I see someone kicking puppies in the street I'll think: "That's intrinsically morally wrong." Before I try to play in the space of "there's no true morality and their perspective is as valid as mine."
If my subjective morality says that slavery is wrong, I don't care what yours says. If you try to keep slaves in the society I live in as well I want you kicked out and ostracized.